Casino Day 1 side 1 - Experts see growing gambling market

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Richard McGowan has a message for those eyeing plans to build a Foxwoods-style resort and casino in Massachusetts - ``if you build it, he will come.''

Peter Reuell

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Richard McGowan has a message for those eyeing plans to build a Foxwoods-style resort and casino in Massachusetts - ``if you build it, he will come.''

And so will his sister, brother, parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, neighbors, friends from work, and just about anybody else looking to strike it rich on the casino floor.

Though thousands of Bay State residents annually cross the border to gamble at casinos in Connecticut, McGowan, a priest and professor of strategic management at Boston College's Carroll School of Management, believes a casino closer to home would lure many back.

``If you make gambling more available, there will definitely be Massachusetts people going,'' he said.

Enough, McGowan believes, to keep a Massachusetts casino firmly in the black.

``It's not a zero-sum game,'' he said. ``As each state opens a casino... the overall market does expand.''

Clyde Barrow, director of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth's Center for Policy Analysis, agreed.

``There is a basic principle in gambling studies, but it applies to almost all retail and service facilities, which is: Given a comparable facility, gamblers will choose the closest one,'' he said.

How many will make that choice, Barrow said, is impossible to say.

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For comparison, though, Barrow pointed to a CFPA study, completed last November, which showed nearly 2 million Massachusetts residents visited casinos in Connecticut in the last year, to the tune of more than $876 million.

Add in the more than $113 million dropped on 200,000 trips to slot facilities in Rhode Island, and Bay State residents spent just under $1 billion on gambling last year alone.

Room to grow

In fact, McGowan, whose third book on casino gambling will be published this fall, sees a day in the not-too-distant future where the Massachusetts landscape is dotted by as many as three casinos.

``There isn't going to be another Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun. Nobody is going to make that much revenue, but if it's done right ... this market is hardly saturated. There's room for growth,'' he said.

How much growth?

As with other forecasts, Barrow said, hard numbers are difficult to come by. In New England states where gambling has been allowed, though, studies show the percentage of people who visit casinos has grown by more than 50 percent from the national average.

In national surveys, Barrow said, about 26 percent of adults say they visit a casino at least once a year. Massachusetts comes in slightly above the national average, at 29 percent of adults answering in the affirmative.

In states where gambling has been legalized, though, the average explodes. In Rhode Island, 38 percent of adults visit casinos. In Connecticut, the number is 40 percent, the second highest average in the nation, behind only Arizona and Nevada, at 44 percent.

``So what you would expect is that as you move more of the population closer to a casino ... you will grow the market,'' Barrow said. ``Instead of an average of three times a year, now they'll go maybe four or five times a year.''

If they build it ...

Creating a successful casino in Massachusetts won't be as simple as turning on a few slot machines and opening the doors, though.

Even if casino gambling does come to the state, many players may still opt to make the trip to Connecticut simply out of habit, said Arthur Wright, an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Connecticut and co-editor of Connecticut Economy, a quarterly economics journal published by the school.

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``The Connecticut casinos have presented an entry barrier,'' he said. ``They have become destinations. They have become THE destinations.

``If you're going to come in and compete with them, you're going to have to create a brand.''

Even if the new casino competes with established facilities such as Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, Wright believes there will be enough revenue to go around.

``One piece of evidence on that is what happened when Mohegan Sun opened,'' he said. ``There was a little blip, there was kind of a pause at Foxwoods, and then everything went on without a break. Foxwoods continued to grow, and Mohegan Sun grew.''

If a Massachusetts-based casino can tap into that market, Wright said, the state would be foolish to walk away from the opportunity.

``If there is a casino (that's) more accessible, that's going to attract people from farther north and west, just because it's that much closer,'' he said. ``If I were a Massachusetts politician ... today, this is a good deal.''

Peter Reuell of The MetroWest (Mass.) Daily News can be reached at preuell@cnc.com.

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